March 10, 2006. Georgi Parvanov, the President of Bulgaria, gave the
President's medal of honor to Vera Kochovska, a 61-year-old woman who
has been Bulgaria's most famous clairvoyant since sightless prophetess
Evangelia "Vanga"
Dimitrova died in 1996. Parvanov acknowledged Kochovska's
supernatural powers and charity efforts. According to a website promoting travel to Bulgaria,
Vera made the following prophecy for the friends of Bulgaria: "If step into Bulgaria soil,
God will bless you! If you come in contact with Bulgarian nature you will
take away with you health and good spirits!"*
Makes me want to step right into it!

Kochovska's paranormal powers reportedly emerged after
awakening from a two-month-long coma brought on by severe injuries suffered
in a car crash when she was 12. Now we know the origin of the South Park storyline for
Cartman's Psychic
Ability (episode 813).

August 11 will mark the 14th anniversary of Vanga's death and scores
gathered at the "Rupite" site in Bulgaria's southwestern town of Petrich,
sometimes referred to as the Jerusalem of the Balkans. The crowd included
not only Bulgarian intellectuals, artists, and common Bulgarian people, but
pilgrims from Russia, France, and as far away as China.

After posting this update, I received the following e-mail from a
Bulgarian:

I have been reading skepdic.com for about a year. Thank you for the
excellent articles. I read the article about Vera Kochovska (grandma
Vanga as we call her ). You wrote "Bulgaria, apparently, is a hotbed of
superstition and magical thinking". I couldn't say it more clearly.

The Bulgarians aren't very religious, but superstitions have a great
influence over us. There are many fortune tellers, astrologers, tea
leave readers, faith healers, numerologists, and the like. I have a
second cousin who is an astrologer; her mother is also an astrologer.
And they are not the only ones. I know that they believe in what they
"see" in the order of stars and planets. The sad (or maybe fortunate?)
thing is that the superstitions belong predominately to women and the
older population. Also there is the media and the numerology (because
after the new millennium there are many dates that look odd -
20.01.2001; 20.02.2002; 20.03.2003 etc. and they "jump at the lagoon"
without even contemplating the fact that these dates are utterly
artificial and they don't indicate anything cosmological. And we have
from time to time the occasional religious clergy who claim that certain
tragedies are the result of god's condemnation for our nonbelief (or
something like that). One personal problem that I have is with my mother
who, despite being quite intelligent and a smart woman, is prone to
believe everything that she hears on the TV. One example is
evolution--she claims that evolution is not true and uses the same
arguments that creationists use--but instead of God and Adam and Eve and
a 6000 year-old-earth she says extraterrestrials populated the earth and
we are their descendants. I tried everything to show her that this is an
utterly useless explanation and there are numerous examples of
evolution. I had no success in changing her mind.

I hope that some day we will get rid of superstitions and move
toward skeptical thinking.

I wrote back that there is hope that the younger generation will overcome
the superstitions of the past and take Bulgaria into the 21st century. But
even if it does, America should be a lesson to all: no matter how much
progress is made to advance scientific, non-superstitious thinking, there
will always be resistance from a large segment of society who love their
gods, spirits, and magical thinking.

February 23, 2006. Nine months
ago, Centre County, Pennsylvania, district attorney
Ray Gricar disappeared
from the face of the earth.
Carla Baron
turned up a few month later and offered her "renowned" psychic services to
help find Gricar. Needless to say, she provided nothing of value and wasted
everybody's time. Gricar is still missing. There's no success like failure,
I guess, because now Baron is coming to Ocilla, Georgia, to "help" in the
search for Tara Grinstead, a high school teacher and former beauty queen who
disappeared four months ago. Baron's also there to tape segments for her
show "Haunting Evidence" that will air on
Court TV in June. I predict that whatever happens, Baron will declare
success and put another undeserved feather in her cap. According to Court
TV:

In the months since Tara vanished, police and
investigators from the Georgia Bureau of Investigation have conducted scores
of interviews, focusing often on key men in Tara's life, including a former
Ocilla police officer and Iraq War veteran from whom she had recently parted
after a tempestuous, six-year relationship. Authorities have also quizzed,
among others, a former student who, by all accounts, had developed a crush
on the teacher, and a cop from a nearby community who had been close to her.

Tara's brother-in-law Larry Gattis and his wife Anita
have been leading an aggressive hunt for the missing 31-year-old. They're
bringing in not only Baron but also a respected criminology professor who
"does a lot with statistical analysis and computer profiles." Good luck to
them. Maybe they should read a little piece by Nancy Maes about her trips to
the psychics:
Psychic readings offer insights, lure of guidance.

Am I seeing things or is there a family resemblance
between Carla Baron, Carla Mae, and Allison Dubois?

Actually, the more I look at these photos the more I
realize that I could easily be persuaded to give up my skepticism and become
a true believer without much nudging! That is, until I come to my senses and
realize that in a few years each of these lovely ladies will look like this:

January 7, 2006. What should
we make of a columnist who writes "No wonder atheists are angry: they seem
ready to believe anything" and then proceeds to attack Richard Dawkins's
views on religion for using "sweeping generalisations"?

The Guardian's
Madeleine Bunting cites G. K. Chesterton, a master of sweeping
generalizations, to suggest that atheists will believe anything. She rips
into Dawkins for oversimplifying matters when he talks about ethics or
religion, yet she doesn't hesitate to oversimplify herself: "the Rwandan
tragedy was about ethnicity, the Holocaust about a racist political
ideology." Yes, and Freud's the one who said everything is sex and Darwin
says we come from monkeys.

She then uses Dawkins as a straw man for atheism and
secular humanism (which she treats as identical) and criticizes Dawkins for
knocking down straw men in his latest rant against the evils of religion.
Bunting's view of history is that secular humanists (whom she calls
atheistic rationalists) are frustrated and angry that religion is still
around and as popular as ever. Maybe someone should inform her that
atheists, rationalists, and secular humanists are not evangelical
missionaries. We aren't gurus or saviors and we don't recruit disciples. We
don't threaten people with eternal suffering if they disagree with us or
promise them eternal bliss if they join our ranks.

Here's a taste of Ms. Bunting's rant:

There's an underlying anxiety that
atheist humanism has failed. Over the 20th century, atheist political
regimes racked up an appalling (and unmatched) record for violence. Atheist
humanism hasn't generated a compelling popular narrative and ethic of what
it is to be human and our place in the cosmos; where religion has retreated,
the gap has been filled with consumerism, football, Strictly Come Dancing
and a mindless absorption in passing desires. Not knowing how to answer the
big questions of life, we shelve them - we certainly don't develop the awe
towards and reverence for the natural world that Dawkins would want. So the
atheist humanists have been betrayed by the irrational, credulous nature of
human beings; a misanthropy is increasingly evident in Dawkins's
anti-religious polemic and among his many admirers.

Humanism hasn't "failed" any more than religion has
"failed." Human beings have failed to create a world where people can live
in peace. Thousands of years of religious propaganda hasn't been able to
restrain human nature. Nor have a couple of hundred years of rationalism and
science. Nobody's been betrayed by anybody. I would say that both secular
humanism and a few religious groups have created compelling narratives of
what it is to be human and our place in the cosmos, but obviously no
narrative whose central feature is non-violence has achieved universal
acceptance. That's not likely ever to happen.

When she sticks to criticizing Dawkins on specific
points, Bunting hits the mark on occasion, but she misses completely when
tries to cast a wider net and bring down atheism and secular humanism while
pricking Dawkins on this or that. (I should note that her critique is of a
television program called
"The Root of All Evil?" that is to air Jan. 9 and 16 on Channel 4. Who
knows what's been edited out of Dawkins's views?)

I particularly dislike her concluding paragraph:

Dawkins seems to want to magic
religion away. It's a silly delusion comparable to one of another great
atheist humanist thinker, JS Mill. He wanted to magic away another
inescapable part of human experience - sex; using not dissimilar arguments
to Dawkins's, he pointed out the violence and suffering caused by sexual
desire, and dreamt of a day when all human beings would no longer be
infantilised by the need for sexual gratification, and an alternative way
would be found to reproduce the human species. As true of Mill as it is of
Dawkins: dream on.

I wrote to Ms. Bunting and asked her where Mill makes
such a claim but as yet I have not had a reply. I've read some Mill but
don't recall this particular desire being expressed. Even if he said such a
thing, it's irrelevant. Or does she think that if there are two
eminent atheist humanists who have had irrational desires, then
Chesterton-and she by association-is vindicated? Dream on.

***

Episode 1 of "The Root of All Evil?" is called "The
God Delusion" and episode 2 is called "The Virus of Faith."